If you happen to visit the website for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Waikiki, which opened in 2006 and holds 456 residences and six penthouses, you’ll find that the hotel chain itself describes itself as “Unbound by conventional thinking.” Considering that the company is named after Donald Trump, the wealthy real estate mogul, it’s hard to find truer words anywhere elsewhere on the Internet.
For most of his public life, Trump was merely an obnoxious rich guy with a double comb-over who confined himself to making (and losing) vast sums of money in commercial real estate development. But when Barack Obama first got himself elected President of the United States Trump remade himself into a race-baiting troll who endlessly accuses Obama wasn’t legally born in the US. Hey, anything to get on television, I guess.
Trump–and the rest of the so-called “Birther” movement of cynical loons–peaked during the 2012 presidential election, then fell sharply off the map after Obama cruised to re-election. I naively figured that he would return to the confines of his luxuriously appointed cave (or wherever it is that he spends his days muttering about vast bureaucratic conspiracies), but I’ve been wrong before. The tragic death of Hawaii Health Department Director Loretta Fuddy in a Dec. 11 Makani Kai Air plane crash off Molokai proved too much for old man Trump to ignore.
“How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 12, “All others lived.”
Packing so much insinuation into such a brief statement is an act of genius. Yes, there nine people on board the Cessna 208 Grand Caravan that made an emergency water landing just minutes after departing from Molokai on its way to Oahu, and only Fuddy died (her cause of the crash and her death is under investigation, but this Dec. 14 Associated Press story citing one survivor says she survived the impact).
Were Trump an actual human being with enough empathy to picture someone like Fuddy as a person–rather than just another crudely drawn stick figure in his nasty, illogical conspiracy–then he might have hesitated before sending out such an insensitive tweet. But Trump has been dead inside for years, existing for little else than to gain attention in any way possible.
Needless to say, it didn’t take long for Makani Kai Air President Richard Schuman to denounce Trump in public. “The conspiracy theory, I kinda took that a little personal that my company or my crew or my people had anything to do with such idiotic nonsense,” Schuman said in this Dec. 14 Hawaii News Now story.
Actually though, Schuman was wrong about one thing. Trump’s dark innuendo about Fuddy’s death wasn’t idiotic–it was cold and calculated and, as his international hotel chain put it, was “unbound by conventional thinking.” He wanted one thing: get people to write about Donald Trump in any way possible. And it worked brilliantly.
Photo of Trump’s hair: BostonJerry/Wikimedia Commons
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